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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 20, 2026

cs.AI

Beyond the Sequentiality Bottleneck: A Hybrid Diffusion-Autoregressive Framework for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan and 1 more

Autoregressive models (ARMs) face a "Sequentiality Bottleneck" in reasoning, while diffusion language models (DLMs) offer parallelism but lack semantic coherence. To addresses both limitations, we propose Collaborative Reasoning Asymmetric Learning (CoRAL), a hybrid framework via an Asymmetric Planner-Executor (APE) architecture: a DLM Planner generates K diverse reasoning trajectories in parallel, while a large ARM Executor selects the optimal plan and synthesizes the final answer. To train the Planner effectively, we introduce Reward-Guided Denoising for CoT (RDC), which integrates outcome-based rewards into the diffusion process to steer it toward goal-directed reasoning. Experiments on vision-language benchmarks show that CoRAL significantly outperforms prior diffusion-based methods and achieves competitive performance against strong ARMs, achieving both superior efficiency and quality.

#02Oct 20, 2026

cs.AI

What Do RTL Repair Benchmarks Actually Measure?

Yeyin Eva Zhu, Rishabh Ranawat

RTL repair benchmarks should measure whether a model can fix broken RTL given a specification. To this end, we construct and hash-bind RTLRepairDataset, 5,784 (broken, fixed) training pairs; RTLRepairBench, 459 held-out cases with 374 syntactic and 85 behavioral mutations; and an evaluation harness supporting simulation and formal equivalence. We then use this infrastructure to identify two measurement confounds. First, simulation and formal scoring give opposite signs for the apparent effect of providing a specification in one evaluated cohort; reset-aware rescoring attributes almost all of the simulation-formal disagreement to reset and first-cycle comparison semantics. Second, on 274 mined model failures, the specification-only minus specification-conditioned recovery point estimate ranges from -8.5 to +18.3 percentage points across six models. Thus, a conventional repair score need not isolate whether the model used the faulty RTL. We translate these findings into evaluation controls: report initialization, reset, first-cycle, and unknown-value semantics; disclose oracle coverage and undecided cases; and include a specification-only baseline. Together, the resources and audit provide both a benchmark for behavioral repair and a protocol for diagnosing what contributes to its measured score. We release the benchmark, the training set, construction code, sanitized aggregate evidence, and reproduction materials at https://github.com/Evaaaz/RTLRepairBench.

#03Oct 20, 2026

cs.RO

SceneRig: An Agentic System for Simulation-Ready 3D Scene Reconstruction from Single Images

Rundong Luo, Yunong Liu, Di Cao and 4 more

Simulation is a powerful tool for robotics, but building diverse, simulation-ready scenes at scale remains difficult. Reconstructing scenes from single images is a promising alternative, but visual similarity alone is insufficient: objects must also be recovered, accurately placed, and physically grounded. Existing methods that rely on post-hoc physics settling often misplace objects, producing scenes that look correct but behave poorly under manipulation. We present SceneRig, an agentic system that turns a single image into an editable, simulation-ready scene. SceneRig combines geometric, visual, and physical tools to reconstruct a faithful 3D scene. An agent then performs edit-and-validate loops inside a physics simulator to achieve physical stability. Across diverse inputs, SceneRig improves instance segmentation, object-centric appearance, and 3D placement while keeping the reconstructed scenes physically stable. Furthermore, SceneRig is effective for downstream robotics: its scenes predict real-robot policy outcomes more accurately than the baseline method and more reliably support replay of recorded manipulations without trajectory adaptation.

#04Oct 20, 2026

cs.CV

Joints, Camera, Action! Co-Generating 3D Motion and Video for Arbitrary Rigs

Noam Rotstein, Yoad Tewel, Chen Tessler and 5 more

Video generation models can now depict remarkably realistic motion. Yet it is unclear how to use this motion beyond pixels: to animate a specific 3D asset and replay the animation in its 3D scene. For instance, a video model can show a monkey jumping over a crossbar, but it cannot return that jump as replayable 3D motion placed in the 3D scene. Here we present a model that directly co-generates the video and 3D motion for any supplied rig, along with a camera that registers this motion to the scene. Prior video-motion models either handle only human skeletons, often adding billions of parameters, or triangulate 3D motion from generated 2D pose maps. We instead keep 3D motion in a separate model that supports arbitrary skeletons, and connect it to a pretrained video model through a small set of cross-attention layers. This separation lets the motion model first learn how skeletons move from motion-only data, which is easier to obtain and augment than paired video. Additionally, our model learns to locate each joint in the video frames, which lets us recover the camera and place the 3D motion in the scene. To train across many skeletons, we use a generative video editor to place animated 3D assets in scenes suited to their actions, curating the edits so their known motion remains valid. Together with human and robot video, this yields nearly 200K training pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that our model animates diverse rigs from text more faithfully than video-first pipelines, and its motion responds to the surrounding scene. It also turns video into rig motion, rig motion into video, and enables keyframe-based control of the 3D motion. Videos and additional results are available on our project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/projects/jca/.

#05Oct 20, 2026

cs.LG

Turning TS2Vec into a Foundation Model for Time Series Classification

Vasilii Feofanov, Zhenghan Tai, Andrei Ermakov and 1 more

TS2Vec is one of the strongest self-supervised methods for time series classification, introduced in 2022. It is designed to be trained anew on every dataset: self-supervised pre-training followed by linear probing. Since then, the field has shifted towards foundation models that reuse one encoder across datasets. Yet TS2Vec offers a compact convolutional architecture that operates directly on temporal samples and accepts variable-length inputs without resampling. We ask whether these properties can be retained when the encoder is pre-trained only once, and show that they can: TS2Vec can essentially be turned into a foundation model. Three changes suffice: pre-train on a synthetic corpus, feed the encoder a raw amplitude view and an instance-normalized shape view of the input through two small stems, and distill one specialist encoder per view into a single encoder. The result, TS2Vec-FM, is a 1.6M-parameter dilated convolutional network that, kept frozen, reaches 83.3% on UCR-128 and 75.3% on UEA-27 under linear probing, within 0.3 pp of MantisV2, the current state of the art, and above TS2Vec trained separately on each target dataset. What we find most interesting is how different TS2Vec-FM is from other foundation models in design: near-parity is reached without attention, without a patch tokenizer, and without intermediate-layer extraction, using an "old-school" convolutional encoder and a two-layer MLP stem.